Owner Scorecard


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AUROW, Aurora Innovation Inc.

Software asset-light UnprofitableCapital build-out

We have used a "Verifiable AI" approach, intended to leverage advancements in artificial intelligence and machine learning to deliver a practical, verifiable, and commercially scalable solution.

The Aurora Driver is designed as a platform to adapt and interoperate amongst a multitude of vehicle types and applications.

To date, we have successfully integrated the Aurora Driver into numerous different vehicle platforms designed to meet its requirements: from passenger vehicles to light commercial vehicles to Class 8 trucks.

Latest annual: FY2025 10-K
AUROW · Aurora Innovation Inc.
I

The business

What it sells, where the money comes from, the kind of company it is.

Revenue · FY2025
$3M
Vital signs · TTM
Cash & investments $791M
Cash burn · annual $598M
Runway 1.3 yrs

The business in brief

read the 10-K →

What this business is and what moves its needle, from its own SEC filings.

Situation
Unprofitable. No meaningful revenue yet; the record is the cash on hand against the burn. Capital build-out. Capital spending has surged to 1033% of sales, today's earnings are charged less depreciation than tomorrow's will be.
What moves the needle
Operating margin has run around −2724% through the cycle, the operating line deeply negative — so the lever is the path to a margin at all: revenue growth against the cost curve and the cash runway, not the level of a margin that isn't there yet. Stock-based pay runs about 229% of sales, a real and recurring claim on owners that the GAAP margin understates. Read this kind of business on retention and the cost of growth. On its own account, the filing leans hardest on pricing power & competition, set against the numbers in what the filing emphasizes, below.
Is it a good business?
Return on capital has rarely cleared the cost of capital (median −37%, above 15% in 0 of 5 years). Owner earnings, the cash-based check, have been thin too. This is price-taker territory, where the balance sheet and the cycle matter more than any multiple; the rest is in the 10-K.

Every line is arithmetic on the company's filings, shown in full in the sections below.

II

The record

Ten years of arithmetic, read across the cycle.

The record, 2019–2025

realized figures from each filing · older years to the left
2019’192020’202021’212022’222023’232024’242025’25TTMTTMMar 2026
Income statement
$20M$0$82M$68M$0$0$3M$4MRevenueRevenue
131%141%190%n/mn/mSG&A / revenueSG&A/rev
548%850%996%n/mn/mR&D / revenueR&D/rev
($114M)($218M)($731M)($1.9B)($835M)($786M)($901M)($934M)Operating incomeOp. inc.
−579.1%−891.5%n/mn/mn/mOperating marginOp. mgn
($94M)($214M)($755M)($1.7B)($796M)($748M)($816M)($831M)Net incomeNet inc.
Cash flow & returns
($95M)($192M)($564M)($508M)($598M)($611M)($581M)($598M)Operating cash flowOp. cash
$2M$3M$16M$22M$21M$21M$30M$30MDepreciationDeprec.
($31M)$2M($45M)$1.0B$17M($28M)$17M$3MWorking capital & otherWC & other
$4M$7M$48M$15M$15M$34M$31M$48MCapexCapex
19.5%58.5%22.1%n/mn/mCapex / revenueCapex/rev
($99M)($199M)($612M)($523M)($613M)($645M)($612M)($646M)Owner earningsOwner earn.
−502.8%−746.3%−769.1%n/mn/mOwner earnings marginOE mgn
($99M)($199M)($612M)($523M)($613M)($645M)($612M)($646M)Free cash flowFCF
−502.8%−746.3%−769.1%n/mn/mFree cash flow marginFCF mgn
$23M$0$0$0$0$0AcquisitionsAcquis.
-33%-96%-44%-37%-37%-44%ROICROIC
-23%-97%-40%-40%-38%-42%Return on equityROE
−23%−97%−40%−40%−38%−42%Retained to equityRetained/eq
Balance sheet
$246M$387M$1.6B$1.1B$501M$211M$221M$791MCash & investmentsCash+inv
$7M$8M$3MAccounts payablePayables
$406M$1.7B$1.1B$1.2B$1.3B$1.3B$1.3BCurrent assetsCur. assets
$32M$91M$83M$111M$105M$111M$134MCurrent liabilitiesCur. liab.
12.7×18.4×13.5×11.0×11.9×11.9×9.5×Current ratioCurr. ratio
$30M$1.1B$0$0$0$0GoodwillGoodwill
$619M$3.7B$2.0B$2.2B$2.1B$2.3B$2.2BTotal assetsAssets
($246M)($387M)($1.6B)($1.1B)($501M)($211M)($221M)($791M)Net debt / (cash)Net debt
($83M)($277M)$3.3B$1.8B$2.0B$1.9B$2.1B$2.0BShareholders’ equityEquity
143.5%268.3%229.4%n/mn/mStock comp / revenueSBC/rev
Per share
254M271M621M1.14B1.33B1.62B1.84B1.95BShares out (diluted)Shares
$0.08$0.00$0.13$0.06$0.00$0.00$0.00$0.00Revenue / shareRev/sh
$-0.37$-0.79$-1.22$-1.51$-0.60$-0.46$-0.44$-0.43EPS (diluted)EPS
$-0.39$-0.73$-0.99$-0.46$-0.46$-0.40$-0.33$-0.33Owner earnings / shareOE/sh
$-0.39$-0.73$-0.99$-0.46$-0.46$-0.40$-0.33$-0.33Free cash flow / shareFCF/sh
$0.02$0.03$0.08$0.01$0.01$0.02$0.02$0.02Cap. spending / shareCapex/sh
$-0.33$-1.02$5.38$1.56$1.50$1.16$1.16$1.01Book value / shareBVPS

The diluted share count moved ×2.29 into 2021 — shares issued, not a split the totals corroborate — and the per-share figures carry the counts as filed.

The diluted share count moved ×1.84 into 2022 — shares issued, not a split the totals corroborate — and the per-share figures carry the counts as filed.

Per-share growththe realized rate an owner's share compounded
6-yr5-yr
Revenue / share−47.4%/yr
Capital spending / share+1.9%/yr−8.2%/yr

The record, charted

FY2019–2025

Each measure over its full record; the current point and the worst year marked.

Share count
1.8Bpeak FY2025
ROIC
−37%low FY2022

Owner earnings vs. net income

Owner earningsNet income

The accountant's number, and the cash an owner can take; the gap is the tell.

($612M)owner earningsvs.($816M)net incomelow FY2024

Net income is the accountant's number; owner earnings is the cash an owner could take out. The walk between them, off the cash-flow statement, and whether the gap is widening or holding.

In fiscal 2025 the business turned a $816M loss into ($612M) of owner earnings: more cash than the profit line showed, after the non-cash charges and the capital it put back in.

FY2025FY2024FY2023FY2022FY2021
Reported net income($816M)($748M)($796M)($1.7B)($755M)
Depreciation & amortizationnon-cash charge added back+$30M+$21M+$21M+$22M+$16M
Stock-based compensationreal costnon-cash, but a real cost+$188M+$144M+$160M+$156M+$220M
Working capital & othertiming of cash in and out, other non-cash items+$17M−$28M+$17M+$1.0B−$45M
Cash from operations($581M)($611M)($598M)($508M)($564M)
Capital expenditurecash put back in to keep running and to grow−$31M−$34M−$15M−$15M−$48M
Owner earnings($612M)($645M)($613M)($523M)($612M)
Owner-earnings marginowner earnings ÷ revenue-20400%-769%-746%

Owner earnings is the cash an owner could pull out without starving the business: operating cash less the capital it must spend to hold its position . The cash-flow statement also adds stock comp back as non-cash, but it is a real cost paid in shares; counted as the expense it is (less $188M), owner earnings is nearer ($800M).

Maintenance capex is estimated as depreciation where a growing business invests above it; free cash flow is the figure the scorecard's free-cash margin reads.

III

Quality & stewardship

Returns, the balance sheet, capital allocation, and pay.

Owner’s Scorecard

FY2025 10-K · source on SEC EDGAR →

Will it survive?

  • No meaningful interest burden
    Little or no interest expense reported
    What this means

    Little or no interest expense reported, the business isn't leaning on lenders to operate.

  • Net cash, debt-free
    Cash $221M + ST investments $839M − debt $0
    What this means

    Cash and short-term investments exceed every dollar of debt by $1.1B, on net the company owes nothing, and can act from strength when others can't. Net debt is the leverage figure that matters: the cash is already set against the debt. Strategic or illiquid investments aren't counted here.

  • Not enough data
    What this means

    The filing data didn't include the inputs for this check.

Is it a good business?

  • Not enough data
    Industry peers: median -32%
    What this means

    The filing data didn't include the inputs for this check.

  • Consumes cash through the cycle
    4-yr median margin, range -20400%–-503%; latest ($612M) = operating cash ($581M) − maintenance capex $31M
    Industry peers: median -584%
    What this means

    What an owner could take out without starving the business: operating cash less the maintenance capital it must spend to hold its position — Buffett's owner earnings. That's -20400% of revenue this year, a -769% median across 4 years. Treating stock comp as the real expense it is (less $188M of SBC) leaves ($800M).

  • Loss, and burning cash
    Net income ($816M) · cash from operations ($581M)
    What this means

    The company reported a net loss, so a conversion ratio isn't meaningful. What matters then is whether operations still threw off cash, here, they did not.

How is the cash used?

  • No surplus to allocate
    What this means

    The business didn't generate positive Owner Earnings this year, so any distributions came from the balance sheet or borrowing, not from operations.

  • Investing or harvesting? 1.03×
    Maintaining
    Capex $31M ÷ depreciation $30M
    What this means

    Descriptive, not a grade. Above ~1× means investing faster than assets wear out (growth, or, sustained for years, today's earnings carrying less depreciation than tomorrow's will). Below means spending less than it's wearing out (efficiency, or a melting asset base). The ratio won't tell you which; the filings will.

Graham’s defensive tests · 1 of 4 met

Graham’s numerical criteria for the defensive investor (The Intelligent Investor, ch. 14), run on the filings. A floor of safety, not a buy signal; many fine modern businesses fail his strictest liquidity rules by design.

  • Adequate size Miss
    Revenue ≥ $2B · $3M
    What this means

    Big enough to weather a storm. Graham's 1972 floor was ~$100M of sales (≈ $700M today); we use a $2B revenue line as a conservative modern stand-in.

  • Strong liquidity Pass
    Current ratio ≥ 2× · 11.86×
    What this means

    Current assets at least twice current liabilities, near-term bills covered without touching the business. Strict by design: many cash-rich modern firms run leaner and miss it, holding their cushion in longer-dated securities.

  • Earnings stability Miss
    A profit every year (7-yr record) · 7 loss years
    What this means

    Graham wanted earnings in each of the past ten years, the stability a defensive owner leans on.

  • Dividend record Miss
    Uninterrupted dividends · none paid
    What this means

    An unbroken dividend was Graham's mark of durability. He wanted twenty years; the filings show about ten, and a single suspension breaks the streak. Non-payers, many fine modern compounders, fall outside his defensive net by design.

  • Earnings growth
    Earnings +33% over the record ·
    What this means

    Earnings were negative early in the record, a growth rate isn't meaningful.

  • Moderate price
    P/E ≤ 15 and P/E × P/B ≤ 22.5 · decided by the price
    What this means

    Graham's valuation gate, the wall he kept between a sound business and a sound investment. Three-year average earnings are $-0.40/share (latest year $-0.42), the averaged base the calculator's gate runs on, and book value is $1.09/share. Enter a price in “What the price implies” just below for the P/E, P/B, and whether it clears. But this is the rule Buffett outgrew: there's no hard P/E law, and a wonderful business can deserve a far richer multiple if the thesis holds, treat it as the bargain-hunter's floor, not a verdict on the price.

Durability & moat, 2019–2025

Whether the record’s returns held, and what the capital reinvested earned.

  • Profitable years 0 of 7
    What this means

    Lost money in 7 year(s), look at what happened there before trusting the average.

  • Operating margin −735% → −16378% (2-yr avg ends)
    What this means

    Through the cycle the operating margin slipped — about −735% early to −16378% lately, median −2724% — competition or costs are biting in.

  • Worst year 2025 · −30033.3% op. margin
    What this means

    Operations went underwater in 2025, understand why before trusting the good years.

Does AI threaten the moat?

Elevated contestability

The product is software or information, the very thing capable AI now produces more cheaply, so the moat is more contestable than the record alone implies.

In its own filing Raised, but not as a competitor

The filing raises AI among its risks, but in other terms (security, regulation, energy or the like), not as a competitor to its product; it frames AI mainly as a capability.

AI has collapsed the cost of building a capable substitute for the very thing this business sells. When a credible alternative can be assembled for a fraction of the incumbent's price, it is pricing power that erodes first, not revenue tomorrow. The live question is whether the moat survives that, not whether it held in the past. Whether that question is answerable at all is yours to decide, against your own circle of competence.

Read from the filing's own risk factors, paired with the industry's structure under its SIC code; the durability is read above, the price below.

All figures as filed; the source filing is linked above.

Current Position

as of the latest quarter, Mar 31, 2026

Can the business pay what it owes this year, off the freshest balance sheet: the quality of the assets, the debt actually coming due, and what a low ratio means here.

Current assets$1.3B
  • Cash & short-term investments$791M
  • Other current assets$481M
Current liabilities$134M
  • Accounts payable$3M
  • Other current liabilities$131M
Current ratio9.49×all current assets ÷ what's due · Graham looked for 2×
Quick ratio9.49×stricter: inventory excluded
Cash ratio5.90×strictest: cash alone against what's due
Working capital$1.1Bthe cushion left after near-term bills
Cash runway1.2 yrsthe business is consuming cash; this is how long the cash on hand lasts at that rate
Current ratio, recent quarters12.9× → 9.5×
Deeper floors
Tangible book value$1.3Bequity stripped of goodwill & intangibles
Net current asset value$1.1BGraham's net-net: current assets less all liabilities
Debt incl. operating leases$79M$79M of it operating leases

From the company's latest filing.

Acquisitions & goodwill

from the balance sheet & the 7-year cash-flow record

Goodwill grows only when a company acquires and falls only when it concedes it overpaid. The size of that bet, the cash put into buying rather than building, and how much has already been written off.

Goodwill & intangibles$617M26% of all assets; the premium carried on the balance sheet for businesses acquired
Against book equity0%goodwill is this share of book equity; the rest is the company’s own retained and paid-in capital
Cash spent acquiring$317Mover 7 years buying other businesses, against $154M of capital spent building

$1.1B written down across 1 year (2022): goodwill the company has already conceded it overpaid for, charged against earnings. A write-down costs no cash (the cash went out when the deal was signed), but it is management marking its own past judgment to market.

Goodwill, acquired intangibles and equity from the latest balance sheet; acquisition spend and write-downs summed across the 7-year record, from the company's own filings.

Management, ownership & pay

read the proxy →

From the proxy: how much of the business the people running it own, and how they are paid, beside what the business earned for its owners in the same years.

Fiscal yearChief executivePay, as filed“Actually paid”Owner earnings
2021Chris Urmson$429k$429k($612M)
2022Chris Urmson$3.9M$2.2M($523M)
2023Chris Urmson$687k$1.2M($613M)
2024Chris Urmson$403k$292k($645M)
2025Chris Urmson$879k$918k($612M)

Both pay figures are the company’s own, from the pay-versus-performance table its proxy statement files. “As filed” is the Summary Compensation Table total: salary, bonus, and equity awards at their value on the day of grant. “Actually paid” is the SEC’s prescribed recalculation, which re-marks those equity awards to what they became as they vested; it can swing far above or below the filed figure in either direction, and negative years occur. Owner earnings are the whole business's, from the record above, for the same fiscal years.

  • Insider ownership1.5%

    The stake all directors and executive officers hold together, per the 2026 proxy: skin in the game, the first thing Munger reads.

  • Stock-based compensation$188M

    The slice of the business handed to employees in shares this year, 6267% of revenue. Buffett's oldest accounting fight: this is compensation, compensation is an expense, real whether or not the headline earnings admit it. One trap: the cash-flow statement adds SBC back, so the operating cash, and the owner earnings drawn from it, are flattered by exactly this amount; counted as the cost it is, what an owner keeps is lower.

Peers, Software

The same industry, side by side on owner economics. Each figure is a through-cycle median, so a peak or trough year can’t distort it; the group median at the foot is the line to read each against.

CompanyRevenueGross marginOp. marginROICOwner earn. margin
BMBLBumble Inc.$966M71%-14.5%-6%
MNTNMNTN Inc.$290M77%8.3%20%
RGTIRigetti Computing Inc.$7M65%-733.7%-61%-612%
KDKKodiak AI Inc. Common Stock$4M-413.3%-363%
ODYSOdysight.ai Inc.$3M29%-593.1%-442%-584%
AUROWAurora Innovation Inc.$3M-1807.5%-37%-758%
SHAZSharonAI Holdings Inc.$2M6%-880.0%-299%
QUBTQuantum Computing Inc.$682K38%-7409.9%-32%-5535%
Group median-663.4%-35%-598%
IV

The price

What a price has to assume.

What the price implies

reverse-DCF

Aurora Innovation Inc. is profitable, but owner earnings are negative this year because capital spending currently outruns operating cash, a build-out, so the owner-earnings reverse-DCF has no positive base to grow. We read the price from both ends instead: type a price to see the steady-state profitability it demands, then set the mature margin you would believe and weigh the two against each other. Nothing leaves your browser unless you enter it in your notebook.

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The assumptions

Enter a price to run it.

Owner earnings it must reach
Margin the price demands
Owner-earnings margin today−16150%

Two reads of one future. From your price: the owner earnings the company must reach, valued at a mature multiple and discounted back at your rate, expressed as the margin it implies on revenue grown at your rate. From your belief: the mature margin you would credit, set on the dial above. When the margin the price demands runs above the one you would believe, you are paying for a future taken on faith. For a deep cyclical at a trough, normalized through-cycle earnings are the better lens; this mode is for the genuinely unprofitable, and for the profitable business whose capital spending currently outruns its cash.

Cite: Owner Scorecard, "Aurora Innovation Inc. (AUROW), the owner's record," https://ownerscorecard.com/c/AUROW, data as of 2026-07-09.

Manual order: ← AUR its page in the Manual AUTL →

Industry order: ← AUR the Software chapter AVPT →